Dead Space – Game Review

I had heard a lot of good things about Dead Space for the PS3, so I finally decided to rent it a couple weeks ago and beat it over the course of two weeks. In the end it took me over 15 hours of game play, which I feel is more than enough. When I was younger some games lasted only a few hours, and I beat one game on the demo machine in Blockbuster. Fifteen hours is also not too long, I never finished long games like Final Fantasy 7 or Oblivion mainly due to getting bored with such a long game.

Some of the really interesting things they did with Dead Space that I hope show up in other games is the lack of a HUD cluttering up the screen. All relevant information is displayed in the game world. The weapons have ammo counters on them, there is a health indicator on the character’s back, and any actual menu’s show up as 3d panes in front of the character, as if a hologram generator was displaying it in the real world. The game wasn’t exactly scary, though I imagine it could be for some people, but I found myself getting tense at certain spots when I wasn’t sure what was around the corner.

When you beat the game you can play on “Impossible” level with all the weapons and armor you collected from the first time, but I still don’t think it has a lot of replayability.